The promise of the smart home continually seems to be just out of reach, but all that changes thanks to a collaboration between FTDI and Bridgetek. Fred Dart (FTDI) and Gavin Moore (Bridgetek) took time out of their busy schedule to speak to Elektor about their demo at Embedded World 2022.

Gavin introduced their Embedded Video Engine, EVE, that is coupled with a Raspberry Pi RP2040 to provide creative visual interfaces. Supporting capacitive touch screens, developers can use their range of demo code to quickly get started. Showing how the smart home can be implemented, Bridgetek also showed a range of sensors that link via an RS-485 network. To avoid having to power each device individually, the system makes use of FTDI's FT232HP bridge chip. It provides the USB to UART interfacing required but also integrates Power Delivery (PD), provide the 20 V supply needed by the sensors on the network.

Get Smart! Elektor Talks to FTDI and Bridgetek

Watch our video to see Fred and Gavin guiding us through their smart home approach!  

"You see the display here and it has been run by our bt-817, which is our fourth generation of our EVE chip," Moore explained. "Now EVE is embedded video engine, and how it works is we use a low-cost MCU, and in this case the Raspberry Pi RP2040, and we communicate over SPI via a graphic chip to the display, and the display can be up to 10 inches." The display module used in the demo is capacitive touch.  
 
 
FTDI smart home